I am grateful and honored to have served as editor of Advances in the History of Rhetoric for four years (2016–2019). A valedictory is an occasion for expressing gratitude, here to all who have made my four-year stint as editor meaningful to me.First, I express gratitude to the American Society for the History of Rhetoric (ASHR) and its Board. During Katya Haskins tenure as editor, the ASHR board voted to devote one issue of the journal to the best papers presented at the ASHR symposium. This policy ensures that the journal represents the interests of ASHR members. In the absence of such a policy, the contents of journal would depend entirely on what came in willy-nilly through the Taylor and Francis portal. If the editor was one who, let us charitably say, was not famous for stretching the boundaries of the discipline, the journal might soon reflect only an editor’s narrow interests. During my tenure, the ASHR policy generated special issues “Rhetoric In Situ,” curated by Kassie Lamp, and “Diversity in and Among Rhetorical Traditions,” curated by Scott Stroud, thus ensuring that Advances documented current interests in visual and material rhetoric and in rhetoric outside of the Western tradition. This policy and Kassie and Scott’s good work helped me to meet my pledge on assuming the editorship to continue Katya Haskins effort to expand the journal’s purview. I should also thank the editors of the other special issues published during my tenure, one on Quintilian, edited by Jerry Murphy, on the occasion of the four-hundred-year anniversary of the discovery in St. Gall, Switzerland by Poggio Bracciolini of the first complete version of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria; and a most interesting special issue on Rhetoric and Economics edited by Mark Longaker.Under my tenure, Advances also inaugurated the policy of publishing book review forums – three – and book reviews – sixteen – over the four years. The forums enabled me to ensure that the journal continued, in a tradition begun by Robert Gaines in his tenure as editor, to be a place for debate and focused discussion. For the book review forums, I owe special thanks to Heather Hayes, who helped organize them. A forum on a critical edition of Jeannette Rankin’s 1917 Address at Carnegie Hall by Tiffany Lewis and the publication in this issue of a translation of work by Chaim Perelman by Michelle Bolduc and David Frank ensured that Advances remained a depository for primary material, as Robert Gaines hoped it would. For help with this focused issue on Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, I thank Andreea Ritivoi for work on the introduction and for her critical eye and good advice.From its beginning under the editorship of the journal’s founder Rich Enos, Advances has taken seriously its commitment to publishing the work of emerging scholars. Sometimes what that means in practical terms is issuing a “revise and re-submit” for manuscripts that the editor knows will require two, three, four revisions on its way to meeting the journal’s expectations. When I committed to such manuscripts I pledged not only my own time but the time of reviewers as well. Reviewing even the most polished of manuscripts requires critical intelligence and tact and takes hours of uncompensated time. We could not continue as a scholarly community without the commitment of talented, conscientious reviewers. I am most grateful to all who served as reviewers for manuscripts I sent them. I don’t feel I can thank all here (though I considered it) but I will single out Glen McClish, Dave Tell, James Fredal, Michele Kennerly, Brandon Inabinet, and James Kasterly for their help and, especially in Glen’s case, sage advice.I certainly would be remiss if I did not thank those who readied manuscripts for production: my three editorial assistants, Allison Prasch, Tara Wambach, and Brittany Knutson, and the Communication Studies Department at Minnesota, embodied in its Chair, Ron Greene, who paid for their help. I thank Taylor and Francis for supportive collegiality and the Press’s Megan Cimini, who, in response to queries, was always helpful, always professional, and always immediate.

O’Connell’s Rhetoric of Seeing joins a growing list of titles interested in restoring performance and visuality to our understanding of ancient Greek culture and, especially, political and legal culture. This work distinguishes itself through its limited focus on the rhetorical function of seeing and visuality in extant forensic speeches. Each chapter addresses a different kind of seeing, often beginning with an overview of the relevant secondary literature, then considering other ancient genres or fields—Plato and Aristotle, poetry or history, medical or rhetorical treatises, and finally examining two or three important or representative examples from legal speeches. O’Connell divides the work into three “kinds” of seeing.First, he looks at what the audience can literally see. Part 1, “Physical Sight,” considers examples of visual bias concerning the physical appearance of litigants or others. This includes familiar arguments from probability (eikos) based on appearance: one need only look at Antigenes to know that he could not have overpowered Pantainetos (Demosthenes 37, Against Pantainetos); a glance at the pensioner’s disability and we can see that the charge of hubris is ridiculous (Lysias 31, For the Disabled Man). It is surprising here that O’Connell does not do more with the visual aspect of eikos arguments, which are said to have begun with Hermes’ infantile appeal to his own youth in his defense speech against Apollo: “Do I look like a cattle driver to you, a burly fellow?” (Hymn to Hermes 265). This is a central and well-trod aspect of ancient rhetorical theory that seems to call out for inclusion and that could have been given a new layer of interpretation through O’Connell’s visual approach. Counter-probability is rare in legal arguments but equally important in the development of rhetorical theory and with similar implications for visual rhetoric. The strong (or young) man who asserts that he would not have assaulted the weak (or old) man because he would be the first suspected depends in part upon similarly visible features of his person (Antiphon 2.2.3; cf. Aristotle 2.24.10–11).The final chapter of Part 1 takes up issues of movement and gesture, with references to gesture in Plato and Aristotle, a brief review of physiognomy, and then a discussion of Aeschines’ widely studied Against Timarkhos. There is brief mention of the rhetorical cannon of delivery or hupokrisis and the recommendations of Cicero, Quintilian, and Dionysius and more recent work on categories of gesture by Karsouris and Hughes, but O’Connell does not take up the rhetorical canon of delivery (hupokrisis) in depth. His discussion of delivery faces the same problems that most scholars face: there simply is no good way to talk about it as a general category. Either atomize the body to talk about hands, then faces, then movement, or settle for vague gestural and expressive categories and recommendations: modest and appropriate or excessive and inappropriate. Attending to specific cases and speeches is often more successful. O’Connell’s discussion of Aeschines’ speech Against Timarkhos goes further toward demonstrating his overall thesis than do his general comments.Second, we can observe the language of visuality in the speech itself, when the speaker asks the audience to look at something literally and directly as visual evidence, or figuratively or indirectly through terms of demonstration, display, and witnessing. Part 2, “The Language of Demonstration and Visibility,” looks at terms of seeing in the orations: deiknumi (demonstrate or display) and its variants (apodeixis, epideixis, endeixis, etc.), phaneros and phainomai (visible) and their variants (kataphanēs, apophainō, etc.), and martus (witness) and its variants. Chapter3 considers the language of display and witnessing, where speakers seek to prove their case by describing what has been shown and seen by witnesses, or where they demand witnesses to prove what has been asserted. “How else,” says Antiphon in On the Chorus Boy, “can I make true things trustworthy” except through the consistent affirmation of witnesses who were present? (Antiphon 6.29). This section is valuable for bringing into focus the centrality of visibility and sight to notions of truth, a factor that can easily be lost in translations. Thus, the speaker of On the Chorus Boy emphasizes not only that he was appointed a counselor and entered the council-house as such, but that he was seen (horōntes) and was visible (phaneros) doing so. O’Connell does not claim, but he enables one to conclude, that the infamous dichotomy between truth and probability in rhetorical theory typically devolves into these two kinds of seeing: what has been witnessed (and is therefore true) and what the situation “looks like” to the audience (and must be probable).Included here is a section on medical and philosophical interest in the visible as an epistemological link to the invisible. O’Connell quotes Anaxoagoras’ maxim, “Visible things are the face of things which are unclear” (101). This could lead to a discussion of the complex and rhetorically important doctrine of signs as tools of rhetorical argument. Instead, O’Connell moves on in chapter four to discuss how speakers use the language of visibility and demonstration to describe arguments. This, argues O’Connell, places jurors into the position of virtual witnesses themselves of something publicly known, as it was known that some grain dealers had been changing their prices over the course of a day (Lysias 22, Against the Grain Dealers). Or they are witnesses of arguments as demonstrations (epideixō). Speakers contrast what the opponent simply says (legei) with what the speaker will “demonstrate in an evident manner” (110). The language of display is thus used to differentiate mere telling from showing. This reference to visual metaphors for the persuasive effects of argument suggests a larger connection with rhetorical argument generally and the role of vision therein.Third, we can attend to imagination as internal sight, or what O’Connell calls “shared spectatorship,” when speakers “try to make the jurors visualize their version of events and accept it as true” (123). This includes a discussion of techniques of vivid description like enargeia, hyptyposis, or ekphrasis via detailed description. O’Connell looks specifically at described scenes of civic suffering, as when Lycurgus describes the panic after the Athenian defeat at Chaeronea. Shared spectatorship can also occur through the construction of “internal audiences—characters in a narrative who witness what is being described and whose reaction can function as a prompt and model for the jury, as when, in the speech Against Diogeiton (Lysias 32), the speaker recounts Diogeiton’s daughter speaking to the family about her father’s embezzlement and lying (150). Visualization can also be heightened through deictic pointing to the persons in court whose actions or suffering is being described, fusing what is physically seen (demonstratio ad oculo) with what is imagined (deixis ad phantasma): “this man here they seized and tied to the pillar” (Lysias fr. 279, 155). This takes us back to the beginning, which addressed seeing in performance space itself. This last section was for me the most interesting and informative, and it seemed the most widely applicable to forensic, and indeed all genres of oratory. Here too, I saw connections to a basic category of rhetorical discourse: narrative and narrative theory, to notions of realism and verisimilitude, to the conjuring of story worlds and the work of narrative inference.Certainly, anyone interested in visual and spatial rhetorics, bodily rhetoric, performance, and related topics will want to be familiar with O’Connell’s work. I found much to admire in every chapter, and more so as the book advanced to later sections and chapters. At the same time, in each section I found myself thinking about some clear and relevant connections to fundamentals of rhetorical theory—theories of probability and signs, of argument and narrative—that the work brushed up against but did not explore. Of course, O’Connell writes as a classicist, not a rhetorician, and we cannot expect any work to follow up every thread that it pulls on, particularly those outside the author’s bailiwick. So, we might rather say that this work promises to amply repay the attention of scholars of rhetorical history and theory for its insights into the operation of sight and seeing—physical, lexical, and imaginary—in Attic forensic speeches.

As my last act as outgoing book review editor for Advances in the History of Rhetoric, I am pleased to introduce a forum on Professor Darrel Wanzer-Serrano’s important 2015 work, The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation. When editor Arthur Walzer and I made the decision to host these forums, we envisioned creating a space where scholars could respond to important new works in the field. Some we expected would be provocative, inviting us to think about new possibilities in the history of rhetorical theory, criticism, and praxis. Professor Wanzer-Serrano’s book is both provocative and timely. It pushes us to think about decolonial love and the struggle of the New York Young Lords in the context of rhetoric studies and at a time when immigrant voices are fighting to be heard amidst increasing violence, dehumanization, and exclusion.

Editor’s Note: The Book Review Forum has become a regular annual feature of Advances in the History of Rhetoric. This issue’s forum features Ned O’Gorman’s The Iconoclastic Imagination. In this work, O’Gorman focuses on events that are so engraved on our memory that we can never forget where we were when we learned of them—the Challenger disaster, the assassination of John Kennedy, for example. O’Gorman examines in what senses and how these iconic moments have saturated public discussion in the context of neoliberal political economy.The responses to O’Gorman’s book by Nathan Atkinson, Timothy Barney, and Rosa Eberly that follow below, as well as Ned O’Gorman’s response, were presented in slightly different form in an ASHR session at the NCA conference in November, 2016 in Philadelphia.

The most important thing to say here is thank you: thanks to Heather Hayes, Rosa Eberly, Tim Barney, and Nate Atkinson for so thoroughly and graciously engaging with my work. Thanks to the American Society for the History of Rhetoric, which more than any other disciplinary organization with which I have been associated has been the source of so many of my “ah ha!” moments. And thanks to rhetorical studies in the United States more broadly, which affords me and many others intellectual and critical space to move. The Iconoclastic Imagination, as my commentators note here, ranges widely. In its scope, and not just its methods, it is a product of a paideia in the house of many rooms that is United States rhetorical studies. I am grateful.I must confess that, as I read responses and reviews, I am still learning about The Iconoclastic Imagination. It is a book, as Professor Eberly knows, that was long in developing. While clear in its basic arguments, it is also a book that you have to deliberately work your way through. As a reviewer in American Quarterly recently wrote: O’Gorman stresses at the outset that The Iconoclastic Imagination is not a “history” of neoliberalism in a conventional sense. There is therefore no overarching narrative to his exploration of different moments of catastrophe in the twentieth century. Instead, he offers a series of essays that, together, argue that the neoliberal imaginary “entails a discourse of transcendence that appeals to invisible, unrepresentable orders as the overarching means of organizing and safeguarding [American] society” (xi). It is an intellectual history, but also a history of state policy during the Cold War. It is a history of media, but also of political economy. It dabbles in the minutiae of film analysis, and it meanders from Byzantine iconography and Protestant iconoclasm through Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan and Immanuel Kant’s theory of the sublime. It dizzies readers so that they might orient themselves in a free-floating neoliberal imaginary. It demands complete attention. If O’Gorman’s narrative approach seems at times bewildering, if it seems to dwell too often in the weeds or the clouds, the book is functioning as intended. (157-158)When I first read these words, I laughed out loud. It was a laugh of uncanny recognition, of surprise that another recognized in this project that I had been living with for so long my own artistic as well as intellectual aims. In fact, I did treat The Iconoclastic Imagination as a work of art, of rhetorical art. Its “bewildering” quality was in fact intentional—an effort at rhetorical iconicity in the way that Michael Leff and Andrew Sachs wrote about it back in 1990 (“Words Most Like Things: Iconicity in the Rhetorical Text,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 54, 1990). But this “intentionality” is probably less a product of my rhetorical intentions than a reflection of my own attempts to come to terms with the bewildering quality of “neoliberalism” as both a critical term and as a political, economic, and cultural formation. The Iconoclastic Imagination is a book of essays precisely because it is an exploration, maybe even an investigation. As a friend of mine who is a Special Agent with the F.B.I. says, bewilderment can be a means of understanding what the hell is going on.Speaking of the F.B.I. and bewilderment, I want to focus the rest of this response on guns, a topic Professor Eberly raised in thinking about The Iconoclastic Imagination. Professor Barney wonders about the role of “the more quotidian rhetorical events of the Cold War play in the perpetuation of a neoliberal imaginary,” noting that The Iconoclastic Imagination does not address the “gaps” between the extraordinary or epochal events it investigates. He is definitely right about the gaps in my book. And if I were to try to fill them in, I would need to take on the quotidian interregnums between the “where-were-you-when?” events I examine. Guns, in fact, are a good place start. Guns are not only pervasive in American culture, they negotiate, on a day-to-day basis, many of the political issues I explore in my book: legitimacy, nationhood, nationalism, national politics, political representation, nature/artifice, and order.Professor Eberly points to the way in which guns circulate in American political culture as a counter-democratic, perhaps even counter-revolutionary, force. Much of The Iconoclastic Imagination is concerned with the sublime, an aesthetic that in the eighteenth-century was a means of rhetorically negotiating revolution and counter-revolution. The sublime, as I suggest in the book, is not just a rhetoric and aesthetic of transcendence, but marks limits and thresholds—that is, it is a rhetoric of limits. In the longer arc of American history, it seems to me that guns have stood as icons of the threshold of political legitimacy. As a revolutionary nation, the United States has long been a nation wherein political legitimacy hangs, like a loose chad, from the ballot. The bullet, in turn, is kept on reserve for a revolutionary function when the sovereign, the state, or the system is deemed illegitimate. Of course, this ballot-and-bullet logic stands at another threshold integral to The Iconoclastic Imagination, that between the American social imaginary and the actual operations of the American state. Guns, as Professor Eberly suggests, form a copia of cultural imaginaries that go well beyond Mayberry, and even the NRA: freedom fighters, survivalists, mafia bosses, kingpins, gangbangers, weekend outdoorsmen, James Bond, cops, and so on. Guns also, especially when amplified into bombs and missiles, have been a primary means of American global power since the middle of the twentieth century. Arms are, in this sense, “icons” of America, images that point beyond themselves without annihilating their own representational integrity. But this means that guns are not really sublime, but mundane.Yet, part of the pacifying quality of neoliberal discourse, and part of its ideological function, is to tell us that what I have just articulated is all wrong: arms aren’t really integral to American power or political culture, but rather part of the nation’s necessary emergency reserve. The essence of America is found instead in its economic productivity, or “freedom.” In this sense, neoliberalism entails an elite discourse positioned against “populist” elements that continue to insist on the primary Hobbesian natural right of self-preservation vis-à-vis guns. Neoliberalism would transform these gun-wielding citizens into participants in the “labor market” as part of a national project in pacification under the conditions of globalization. To which, in a kind of reversal of the ballot-and-bullet logic, these gun-wielding citizens approach the ballot as a kind of emergency reserve by which to protect their natural right to the bullet: and so, we have the NRA, Donald Trump, and now, perhaps, Neil Gorsuch.I think Professor Atkinson is quite right to draw our attention to indexes so as to better orient collective action in bewildering times. Guns, to be sure, are indexes of shifts in American political and economic culture. Gun ownership is rapidly becoming what Hobbes would call a natural right. Guns are, as Professor Atkinson suggests, “signs linked to their objects by causal connection.” My point in The Iconoclastic Imagination was not to cast doubt on the political potential of indexes so much as to argue that within the parameters of the neoliberal imaginary indexicality cannot be taken for granted—that it, like normative versions of rhetoric, depends on certain cultural and political conditions in order to survive, let alone to thrive. So, I would join Professor Atkinson in his call to citizen-critics (a phrase I first learned from Professor Eberly) to “direct our theoretical and critical energies toward exploring the index as mode of representation.” Guns and arms are an important place to look. I would only insist that we recognize just how difficult such looking is under neoliberal conditions. It can be downright bewildering.

The review of work on ancient Roman rhetoric that follows below is the first of what I hope will become a regular feature in Advances in the History of Rhetoric—comprehensive reviews of scholarship in a given area. Subjects for these reviews and author-reviewers can be proposed to the editor or invited by the editor. Proposals from senior scholars working in collaboration with graduate students are especially welcome.

From time to time, we will dedicate our review section to the discussion of a new work in rhetoric studies. In these more lengthy review sections, which we are calling “Book Review Forums,” we will invite scholars to write short responses to the chosen book and invite the author to respond to the reviews. We hope this will offer a robust space for discussion, debate, and deliberation over important book-length works as we think about advances in the history of rhetoric.Forum: James L. Kastely, The Rhetoric of Plato’s Republic: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of PersuasionThis issue’s forum focuses on Professor James L. Kastely’s 2015 work, The Rhetoric of Plato’s Republic: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion (University of Chicago Press). Within rhetoric studies, Plato is often cast as rhetoric’s foremost critic, and, at least since Karl Popper included Plato as an enemy of the open society, as a foremost critic of democracy. In his book that is the subject of this forum, James L. Kastely offers a new reading of the Republic that challenges both of these characterizations. He argues that Plato’s goal in the Republic is to develop a rhetoric for philosophers that will persuade non-philosophers of the value of justice and the importance of living the moral life. On Kastely’s reading, Socrates presents this rhetorical approach to persuasion as an alternative to dialectic, which the interlocutors in the Republic judge to have failed to persuade the non-philosopher of much, except that philosophy is useless pettifoggery.The responses to Kastely’s book by Arabella Lyon, Bruce Krajewski, and Michael Svoboda, as well as Kastely’s response to their judgments that constitute this forum, were first presented at an ASHR session at the Rhetoric Society of American conference, May, 2016, Atlanta, Georgia. The panelists revised and shortened their original oral presentations for publication here

I am honored to be the fourth editor of Advances in the History of Rhetoric (AHR). I walk in the shadow of distinguished predecessors, and I pledge imitation as the currency of my respect and gratitude. One can never equal the contribution of a founder, but to Rich Enos, who began Advances in 2002 and served for six years, I pledge to continue his expressed and enacted commitment to encouraging, aiding, and then publishing the work of beginning scholars. By his example, Robert Gaines, editor from 2004–2011, teaches me to be a proactive editor—not to depend for the content of the journal exclusively on what comes in through the transom but to create platforms for experienced scholars to address timely questions in colloquies and to invite and publish translations and critical editions as well as thesis-driven essays. Katya Haskins, who served from 2012–2015, made special issues a regular feature of the journal, a practice that I will continue, but even more importantly worked intentionally to expand the scope of Advances to ensure a robust and inclusive understanding of “the tradition” in terms of the periods emphasized, national literatures covered, and the media examined under the sign of rhetoric. I hope to publish any quality work in rhetoric that benefits from being examined through an historical lens. I also welcome the work of graduate students, will initiate a regular invitation to submit proposals on special issues, and will regularly publish book reviews and invited essays that assess the state of the research on particular period or topic.I encourage scholars working on topics related to historical rhetoric to submit their essays to AHR. I promise you a fair and quick review process. If your essay is accepted and published it will be available to patrons of the over 2000 libraries that subscribe to one of the Taylor & Francis packages that includes AHR.